D/S: Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani. P: François Cognard, Eve Commenge. Cast: Marie Bos, Delphine Brual, Harry Cleven, Bianca Maria D’Amato, Cassandra Forêt. UK dist (Blu-ray): Anchor Bay Entertainment.
In Amer, a feverish homage to the Italian giallo, moments of heightened emotional intensity in the life of a young woman – girl, teen, adult – are exploded in agonisingly stylised detail, in the manner of a Robbe-Grillet novel brought to the screen by Dario Argento, Mario Bava, Sergio Martino and three dozen others. To give you an idea of where Amer’s directors are coming from – Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani share joint credit here– imagine the ten-minute pre-credits sequence to Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1969) stretched to feature length. Ambient sounds; beads of sweat; ruffling fabric; macro closeups of insects on skin; hyper-fetishized details of the human body (specifically female); all punctuated, now and then, by the languid strains of Bruno Nicolai, Stelvio Cipriani and Ennio Morricone.
Enter at your own risk. This is experimental Arthouse territory, in its most uncompromising form; while offering much to ravish the senses, the film often plays like a film-school exercise in suffocating formal obsession. There’s no story, no characters: just a succession of archetypes, generic situations and beautifully composed frozen tableaux designed to evoke the mood and visual texture of 1970s Italian thrillers. It’s dramatically null, often excruciatingly tedious and seems doubly longer than its ostensible 90-minute running time; more art gallery installation than motion picture. Barring a couple of sequences (the opening Suspiria homage, and the closing razor mutilation) this isn’t really what you’d call “horror”; it’s a mood piece, fascinated more by distorting and extending time than in telling an actual story or creating genuine suspense. Amer is probably essential viewing for fans of Seventies Eurotrash cinema, but a brain-shrivelling endurance test for anyone else.
Postscript: The directors returned, in 2013, with The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears –an even more fetishistic, and still more tedious, extended remix of Amer’s obsessions. It can be recommended only to fanatics.